Halloween is Holly’s favorite holiday of the entire year, but she’s not so much into the scary movies. I, on the other hand, have a hard enough time really suspending disbelief that it’s rare when a movie really, truly frightens me. So, we decided to put our opposite-ends-of-the-spectrum heads together to come up with a list of movies (and some TV episodes, too) that really, truly scare us.

• First off, real information! Fear: How does it work? (Spoiler:  It starts in your brain.)
• River Tam’s hypothalamus
• Also, a real experiment! My medically assisted airplane travel
• “Paranormal Activity“
• “Nosferatu“(This one’s in the public domain now, so you can see it many places for free!)
• “Poltergeist“
• Wicked stepmothers and Miss Hannigan
• A trailer that scared Holly senseless, featuring a haunted house that glassed over a pool with the family inside. Do you know what movie that is? Tell us if you do! “Burnt Offerings” is one theory but seems maybe not to fit, since that’s more like the house is churning up the pool.
• Ghosts and whether they scare me
• Rob Zombie
• “Twin Peaks” and the VHS tapes containing it
• One of Atlanta’s local nicknames: Murder Kroger
• “Lost Highway“
• “The Exorcist” and its beautifully horrifying execution
• Bob at the foot of Laura Palmer’s bed (Do you know what this looks like? Creeps me right out. Can’t find a SFW page with a picture of it to link to, though.)
• “Signs“
• The “new” “Doctor Who” and its scary monsters, including the Weeping Angels, the gas mask kid in “The Empty Child,” and the dolls in “The Girl in the Fireplace”
• The Gentlemen from “Buffy”
• All insects and arachnids being OK with me, except maybe wasps (although it has been pointed out to me since we recorded this that many species of wasp feed on other pests, like mosquitoes, so, wasps, I guess you can live. But mosquitoes are right out.)
• “Blair Witch“
• Whether you remember everyone you’ve ever seen vomit (While I’ve found many studies that have used “vomit” as a word with a powerful emotional impact, and a study pinpointing the sound of someone vomiting as the most revolting sound, I haven’t managed to track down the one I think I remember reading.)
• “Shallow Grave“
• “The Orphanage“
• Neil Gaiman‘s impressive achievement of writing a story that scared me (“Coraline“)
• How Fear Works
• How Halloween Works

Here’s a link to the episode: Movies that Scare Us Silly

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